The iWatch Will Run iOS, Have 4-5 Day Battery Life [Report]

Following Bloomberg’s report that the iWatch is a project Apple wants to deliver this year, the Verge has an interesting report saying that the iWatch project is being lead by Jony Ive himself, and that it will run a full version of iOS.

According to the Verge, Ive is leading a team of 100 engineers to get the iWatch out by the end of the year, and he’s opted to make the device run iOS instead of the iPod nano’s proprietary operating sysem.

Battery life right now is the key concern with getting the iWatch right:

That’s apparently leading to battery life issues in development, according to our sources: the goal is to last at least 4-5 days between charges, but the current watch prototypes are apparently only going for a couple days max. We’re also Apple also has some work to do with iOS on the iPhone, which currently has several hooks for supporting a watch-like device but lacks the appropriate interface or settings to make it work properly. The Pebble watch, for example, can receive notifications from third-party iOS apps with a slight hack, but it has to be redone every time the Bluetooth connection breaks.

There’s starting to seem like there’s fire behind the smoke of these iWatch rumors. Wearable computing is obviously the next big thing, but Apple would still be enterting the field early. Is the iWatch really the next big thing?